Jimmy Harmon, chief of the criminal division of the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, was standing in a courtroom packed with journalists and onlookers during a Tuesday afternoon bond hearing in Richard Glossip’s case, when he announced that the state would be calling a couple of witnesses.

The announcement was unexpected; the state hadn’t notified Glossip’s attorneys that they planned to put anyone on the stand. When Harmon said his first witness’s name — Malissa West — the confusion appeared to deepen. No one, not Glossip, his attorneys, or supporters in the gallery, seemed to know who this woman was.

After West introduced herself as the “resident communications specialist” at the Oklahoma County Detention Center, in charge of monitoring outgoing phone calls placed from the jail, it became clear that Harmon intended to introduce into evidence a recording of a call between Glossip and someone on the outside. Glossip glanced at his wife Lea, sitting in the front row. He looked confused and a bit nervous and shrugged, signaling he had no idea what this was about.

Corbin Brewster, one of Glossip’s defense attorneys, objected. They hadn’t heard the recording in question and wanted a chance to listen to it. Judge Heather Coyle agreed, and the lawyers filed out of the courtroom.

It was the second time in as many weeks that Glossip was back in Coyle’s Oklahoma County courtroom after the U.S. Supreme overturned his conviction for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, who was killed at the rundown motel he owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted Glossip had put him up to it. Prosecutors said that Glossip orchestrated the killing to cover up the fact that he’d been embezzling money from the motel, offering to split with Sneed any cash Van Treese had on him at the time of his death. Although the evidence to support the theory was thin, two different juries found Glossip guilty and sentenced him to death.

Glossip faced nine execution dates and was served three last meals before the court ruled in February that his case had been tainted by false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The hard-won victory was due in no small part to Harmon’s own boss, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who took unprecedented steps to prevent Glossip’s execution and fought alongside his attorneys to have the conviction tossed — only to announce in early June that he intended to try Glossip for murder a third time.

Among the spectators in the eighth-floor courtroom were members of the Van Treese family, who sat in the front row. Until Harmon sought to introduce the recorded call, the hearing had been going as expected. Brewster had laid out the reasons why Coyle should release Glossip from jail pending a third trial for first-degree murder: Glossip didn’t have any meaningful criminal history before being sent to death row, is not a flight risk, and has a wealth of individuals ready to support him after release — including Lea, friends, and religious leaders, and at least one current Republican state lawmaker.

But the most important reason why Coyle should grant bond, Brewster said, was that there is no reliable evidence that Glossip is guilty of murder. In order to keep Glossip in jail, Brewster pointed out, Coyle would have to find that the state was likely to win a third........

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